News

Five reasons IT directors love software defined storage

Just when you thought it was safe to come out from behind your jargon-proof shelter there’s a new acronym on the block – SDS. Software-defined storage, to spell it out, is “a storage architecture for a wide array of data storage requirements based on a set of loosely-coupled software and hardware components”, explains IBM on one of its websites.

Dropping the jargon for a second, it has a number of advantages:

Efficiency: most storage systems work in the old-fashioned manner, buy some storage, hope it fits; if you need more, buy more, if you need less you’ve wasted some of your budget. SDS partly does away with this. Of course you still have to buy storage according to your needs but the reactive and dynamic nature of SDS means the system makes the best use of the resource.

Cost savings: As the name suggests, software defined storage allows the software to define the storage. In reality this means that unlike a number of storage management systems it looks for “storage” and doesn’t care, depending on your own choice of configuration, whether it’s the fastest new technology or something considerably older. In pure cost terms, this can make it cheaper.

Agile consumption: Related to the previous point, SDS is entirely neutral about whether it’s storing things in the cloud or on site, so if your enterprise decides to go cloud-based (or for any reason pulls out) the advantages remain in place.

Extra control: The nature of the system means that if you need to deploy storage quickly, it can be done easily and will maximise any extra resource put into it or react quickly when it is taken away.

Effectively this means you have ‘storage as a service’ if you decide to deploy it within the cloud, configuring upwards and downwards as required and ensuring that you pay only for what you use.

There are numerous reasons to adopt SDS; if you wanted to sum it up simply you might say it puts you and your decisions in the driving seat, whereas the more traditional systems tell you how to manage.